Sharp and Dangerous Virtues
Page 32
Lila saw Allyssa slip a foil-wrapped item the size of a cigarette pack from the exam table into the pocket of her smock. “What’s that?” Lila asked sharply.
“Come on, pudding-face,” Allyssa said to Janie, “Let’s get you home.”
“I’m not drinking now, Janie,” Lila said. “I dried myself out.”
“Really?” Janie’s face lit up. “That’s great, Aunt Lila.”
“I quit for you, Janie,” Lila said. “It was hard, but thinking of you made me do it.”
“That’s wonderful, Aunt Lila. You should be really proud.”
“I am proud. That’s why I came to get you. I’m finally ready to take you home.”
Allyssa cast Lila a scathing glance. It’s a love triangle! Lila thought, astonished, wondering how she’d missed this. She thought of her life of love triangles—she and Kennedy and Leesa, she and Kalana Middleton and Jessica, she and … All her other triangles seemed small and misshapen, capable of being mangled, while this one had a solidity to it, this one was iron and equilateral. Mother love was a ferocious thing. What she had missed by not having a child …
“Will we go to the fields on the … ?” Janie started, but Allyssa gave her shoulder a quick admonitory squeeze.
“You’re a true Esslandian, aren’t you, Jane-bug?” Allyssa said.
Jane-bug. Pudding-face.
Janie smiled and nodded, avoiding Lila’s eyes.
Allyssa’s grip tightened. “My little Jane-bug.”
Lila hugged herself and followed the tight package of Allyssa and Janie down the hall and into the waiting room, hung with Norman Rockwell reproductions, where a woman in a billowing beige shirt and pants full of pockets—worker’s pants, Lila thought—sat with her head high, staring. “You don’t have to follow,” Allyssa said to Lila, pulling her young charge even closer and pushing open the door to outside.
A reassuring ritual. Do we go to the fields now? The foil packet in Allyssa’s right hand … A burial? A sacrifice?
What did Lila used to call Janie? Honey? Little woman? You’re nothing but a dirty old lady, Allyssa would snap. How dare you call her your … ?
“Get down from there!” the woman in the waiting room barked. Lila followed the woman’s gaze to a boy of about six standing on one of the waiting room chairs. The boy had cropped brown hair and startlingly green eyes; he grinned at Lila. “Jeff!” the woman said again. “Did I say to sit down?”
Jeff? Lila glanced again at his eyes before turning to the woman. “Is he … Is he a … ?” But she stopped before the word “clone,” because the woman would never answer that question, and in the meantime the door to the outside was closing, Allyssa and Janie hidden from her view.
“Where are you taking her?” Lila shouted as she burst outside. “What’s this about the fields?” She wondered what the woman in the lobby knew about this, she yearned to catch her reaction, but glancing from the bright parking lot back into the lobby she couldn’t make out the woman’s face. Allyssa and Janie were almost running, their feet splatting on the parking lot stones, and as Lila pursued them she realized she could never keep up.
“Janie!” Lila shouted. “Janie, do you want this?”
“She’s drunk!” Allyssa shrieked. “Ignore her!”
“I’m not drinking!” Lila shouted. “I quit for you, Janie. I love you.”
Janie’s face turned then. Still running, she looked back at Lila over her left shoulder, and that lovely face—young, intelligent—had a peculiar trapped and wistful quality, a look that reminded Lila of a girl painted by Vermeer. This was a strange thought for Lila, who never thought about art, but it brought back the elementary school classroom where she’d first seen the painting, where the excitable Picture Lady (somebody’s mother who volunteered) pointed at Vermeer’s girl and exclaimed that this painting did something only art could do: it stopped time. Lila hadn’t understood the Picture Lady then, but she did now, at this moment, with Janie’s beautiful face still turned and the sky blue and a burial hummock rising in the distance. Dear God, Lila thought, dear God, and who knows what this meant, curse or prayer, praise or petition, because it was Lila’s last thought, just as Janie’s face was her last vision, just as every aboveground being, for a radius of two miles, Janie and Allyssa being almost at the epicenter, experienced at that instant their last thought or vision or tingle, because twenty megatons of power reached its target, an ostensible farm equipment shed which was really (the intelligence reports were accurate, although the tip had come from a dubious character named Ferrescu) a munitions storage depot, a strategic target, as President Baxter pointed out, stricken with surgical precision. Not that President Baxter meant to dismiss the few civilian casualties, of course, but these were Esslandians, and this was war. And in war, unfortunately, innocent people, at times even children, are called upon to suffer.
the face of war
“WHY DAYTON?” CHAD said. “Why do we live in a suburb of Dayton, instead of Dayton being a suburb of here? After all, Centerville had limestone and the highest elevation in Montgomery County. Centerville had stone sidewalks when Dayton had roads made of mud. Beavertown had a post office.”
Abba whispered something to Howard.
“The river?” Howard said.
“Yes, the river!” Chad cried. Ridiculous; no wonder Ramsey laughed at his course. “You’re exactly right, Howard: the river is what did it. Think of what you can do with a river”—he was holding out one finger—“you can …”
They figured out fishing right away, then transportation and commerce, and last, after a number of hints, the powering of mills. At that moment Chad, to his surprise, was struck with wave of emotion. “But any river has its dark side, doesn’t it?” he said. “It gives, it takes away. The first flood was in 1805 and D. C. Cooper wanted to move the town but people said they couldn’t afford it, and the second flood …” But Chad couldn’t go on.
“Life can be bad, Howard,” he choked out. “Anything can turn on you. Even faith, even hope, even …”
“Good grief,” Abba said, “they let you teach this at a Catholic college?”
THE HIT WAS by all reports a great success, taking out not only the munitions warehouse but establishing a pie-shaped wedge of safe airspace, and the pilot and the copilot were sent up on surveillance. They flew low. It was a gorgeous May morning and eighteen hours postevent. In the distance there were green fields and humps and, to the east, a sort of shimmer. “Is that water?” Grady asked.
“Indian Lake,” the copilot said. “Been there forever.” Grady wondered at this information, because from what he’d heard all the lakes of Ohio—with the exception of Lake Erie, which made up much of the state’s northern border and was one of the five Great Lakes—were manmade.
At the center the site looked like the moon, but at the edges you could see, even from the air, clumps of dirt with green on them, cinder blocks and cinder-block fragments, the charred and upended remains of vehicles. “Let’s land here,” the copilot pointed, and they came down between the remains of the munitions shed (which was pulverized) and another building of some sort, which looking at their coordinates was a possible clinic. All the buildings were possibles: who knew, with the Gridians, what uses they put their buildings to. Grady and his copilot had been asked to land and investigate.
They got out. Hard to imagine this as farmland, as any land worth having. It reminded Grady of the hole gouged out of the ground for his parents’ house, but that had been only a gash in a green landscape, and this was the whole landscape. He was glad he’d seen the site first from the air, surrounded by fields and normalcy, and he knew that this was a limited desolation.
The copilot shook his head. “Wild.”
It was death, was what it was. Death come from the sky. Grady had heard that bombs hit before the sound of them arrived. You heard the explosion, you knew that you’d survived. Grady kicked at a wad of soil, knocking it aside. There, lying in the dirt, looking up at him, was a face.
The face, peculiarly enough, was not terrible to him. All the limbs and body parts he could have come across, and he had found instead a tidy triangle of skin and muscle. He bent over to brush off the piece of debris, then realized it was a mole.
“What?” the copilot said, stumbling toward him. “What’re you looking at?”
“The face of war,” Grady said, and it struck him that this comment was a profound thing, a new reference point in his life. “The face of war,” he repeated, proud of the phrase. Usually the only things he said twice were comments he thought were funny.
The copilot vomited. Grady imagined his stomach torn from his abdomen and erupting out of his mouth, which in this landscape seemed possible. “You okay?” Grady said, patting his copilot’s back.
“We’ve got to bury it,” the copilot said eventually, one hand over his eyes. “It’s gruesome.”
“Okay.” Grady hesitated, glancing at the pitted ground around them. A thousand clods of dirt, and he was scared to overturn another one. “It’s not very big,” he said. At these words the copilot started retching again. “I’m going to bury it right here,” Grady said, squatting to dig with his hands. “Nice nose,” he added.
“Swear to God, if you start in like this I’m, I’m …”
“I was just noticing something, I didn’t …”
“Stop it!”
“Could you maybe get me the shovel?” Grady asked after several unsuccessful minutes. Must have been a Gridian, he reflected, with this normal, ordinary face. People talked about the Gridians as if they were monsters. He remembered Rapunzel at the Green House, and hoped she stayed alive.
The copilot returned from the helicopter’s emergency bay with the shovel. But after Grady had dug the hole—maybe eighteen inches deep and two feet around, too deep for animals to get at—and had the face perched on the end of his shovel, he found himself in a quandary. He didn’t want to turn the face over—that would be gruesome—but he didn’t want to put it in the hole and dump dirt into its mouth and eyes. Let his partner think his sick thoughts about Grady: what Grady felt for this face was respect. He thought of the thin black netting that edged the bottom of his parachute, how from that he could fashion a veil. “Could you grab my parachute?” he asked.
“Look,” Grady said when he had the face and its veil arranged in the hole, and he almost said, but he stopped himself: “It’s pretty.”
The copilot peeked through his fingers. Behind the netting, surrounded by dirt, the wedge of face looked serene and lovely. Queen of the Earth, Grady thought. The mole shone like a dark jewel. I can leave things better, Grady thought. I’m not a monster.
When Grady had filled the hole, he and the copilot walked to the nearest ruined building. They walked slowly and carefully, eyes down, not wanting to see more.
THE PRESIDENT’S PERC message was more personalized this time: due to the dangers faced by citizens of Dayton, especially with America leaving open the possibility of bombing Alliance military installations just north of their city, Sharis and Chad were being asked to relocate to one of three “SafePlace” camps at the southern end of the quarantine area. The camps were being erected now, with tent space for individual families as well as some trailers; this relocation was purely voluntary, but families arriving at the camp early would get first choice of accommodations. Anyone presenting to the SafePlace camp in the next twenty-four hours was guaranteed an air-conditioned lodging.
Chad studied Sharis’s face as she read the message on the holo-screen, the tender skin below her right eye twitching. “It’s like the Grid all over the again,” she said. “They’re moving us out.” She stood up. “I’m taking down the flag.”
“But it’s different. Then they were moving people for their own convenience, now it’s for our own … President Baxter’s always said that his goal is zero American civilian casualties. And now that there’s an election next year he has to …” The boys, Chad was thinking, we have to protect the boys.
Sharis was heading for the front door.
“Don’t take down the flag!” Chad shouted. “I forbid you to take down the flag!”
“Air-conditioning!” she shrieked, already pulling at the fabric. “All we’ve been through, they think we’ll fall for air-conditioning?”
THE CAPTAIN WAS part of the military–Montgomery County liaison team, a hopeless assignment involving monthly meetings he survived largely through sexual fantasies. The Consort rep had had breasts as big and round as cantaloupes, but then she got herself killed and was replaced by a male youngie. The woman from water was a terror, and the captain didn’t even look at her for fear of tainting his much-cherished scenarios involving two or three hot women. The other members of the team—representing the air force, Montgomery County government, the City of Dayton, local police, the Metropark system, clergy—were middle-aged men of varying stiffness. The one Melano in the group, the parks representative, scared the captain half to death, but fortunately he missed a lot of meetings. Lately, almost everyone missed meetings.
“Where’s the water witch today?” the captain said—a good enough line, but no one even smiled. The air force representative, a holier-than-thou lieutenant colonel, actually winced.
“Do you know something?” the boring youngie from Consort asked eagerly.
“He don’t know nothing,” the parks man said, and the captain thought, not for the first time, how he hated that affected style of speech.
“What?” the captain said. “She drop out of our council?”
“She’s disappeared,” the policemen said. “That’s not for public consumption.”
“She probably just sneaked out of town like everyone else and their sister,” the captain said.
The policeman shook his head. “I went over to her house and there was garbage in the sink and a mattress on the floor and water lying around and …”—he massaged his forehead—“oh, God. Most people who leave leave things picked up. In my experience.” He lifted his eyes wearily to the youngie from Consort. “How you guys doing?”
The youngie shrugged. “We need reliable water.”
“That assistant of hers got killed back in December.”
“Seymour,” the Consort youngie said. “Yeah. We wonder if she got the same treatment.”
“The water witch is dead?” The captain leaned forward in surprise.
“Don’t jump to conclusions.” The policeman’s thumb twitched. “We don’t have proof of anything. You got your computer people working on the map? It’s not in her house, that’s for sure. We went through like a hundred laptops.” The policeman turned to the captain to explain. “The water map was wiped off all the office computers.”
“You need someone with expertise to get rid of that,” the clergyman said. And then, as if he’d overstepped his role: “Wouldn’t you?”
“Someone tortured her, maybe,” the youngie from Consort broke in. “Got into the computer system, got the info they needed, wiped it out for everyone else. Someone’s bleeding us somehow. We’ve got periods of crazy low pressure. Our backflow preventers are working overtime. If we had the map, we could maybe figure out where the mains are vulnerable.”
“You think she’s a traitor?” the Captain asked. “Think she’s working with the Alliance?”
“Or the Grid,” the policeman said. “She went up there for a visit last summer; we found records.” The captain felt a surge of irritation. Why were there two enemies to think about? He’d liked it better when there was one. Things were getting very strange, really. Lieutenant Grady had come back from the munitions hit site babbling about burying a face
. Absurd. Probably one of those voodoo masks they have up there, hang it on the wall and pray to it.
“Jesus,” the captain said. “But our water’s fine,” he added. “I haven’t seen any problems at the Base.”
“You’re at the other side of the city from us,” the Consort youngie pointed out.
The Dayton city manager said, “To be frank with you, we’re glad the Feds are pulling people out of Dayton. We can’t handle a population right now.”
“Speaking of Jesus,” the clergyman said, nodding toward the captain, “perhaps we should have a prayer for our missing colleague.”
“Speaking of prayer,” the parks representative said, “you think we got a prayer of staying alive?”
“MOMMY!” LEON WAS breathless, his face alight; his bangs stuck to his forehead. “Tanks.” Sharis cast her eyes inquiringly at Howard, just behind him, who nodded in eager confirmation.
“Where?” The boys had been outside, supposedly in their sphere of six safe lawns. Sharis suspected that they ventured beyond it, although she’d made little effort to know. Like Abba said: better sometimes not to. To Sharis, wanting to know every second where her boys were seemed like giving in to fear.
“Up by Aunt Gentia’s. Coming up Far Hills.”
“Right in the street?”
Leon’s face cracked into a smile. “They waved at me!”
“Someone came out of the top and waved? You saw people in them?”
“No, Mommy.” Leon was on his tiptoes in excitement. “They waved their guns at me!”
Sharis couldn’t breathe. She backed into the living room and sat herself down. “Leon, this is important. Were these American tanks? Did they have the U.S. flag on them?” Just like the Gridding again. Rounding us up. Her mind was spinning with options and plans. “Which way were they headed?”
Howard made a vague gesture north. “There’s a battle up north,” Chad said, and she was startled to realize that he was standing behind her. “They’re going to meet the Alliance troops.”
A barbed understanding flooded her, like swallowing a handful of nettles.